David Bowie and Iggy Pop set for Biopic

Rock stars and collaborators David Bowie and Iggy Pop are to be immortalised yet again in a big screen biopic directed by Gabriel Range. The film, which is to be titled Lust for Life after Iggy’s 1977 album of the same name (on which Bowie also worked), will look at the collaborative friendship between the two musicians.

Unlike your average biopic, the film will not follow the two subjects from children to adults and onwards into stardom, but will concentrate mostly on their collaborative period in Germany during the 1970s. The pair worked together on Iggy Pop’s first two solo albums, and also on Bowie’s album Low while living in West Berlin.

David Bowie has recently released Where Are We Now, his first single in a decade, with a new album to follow. It’s clear from the lyrics that the period he spent in Germany with Iggy Pop has been much on his mind, and was a time of great creative and personal upheaval for the artist.

Director Gabriel Range has previously worked on films Death of a President, which imagined the fictional assassination of George W. Bush, and I am Slave, a harrowing look at the slave trade in modern London. The screenplay was written by Robin French, and has apparently been mostly based on biographies of Bowie and Iggy Pop written by Paul Trynka (Starman and Open Up and Bleed respectively).

Bowie and Iggy have been allegorised on film before, in Todd Haynes’ 1998 film Velvet Goldmine; the film is a fictional story about two collaborative rock stars played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor, who were loosely based on the real life singers. Haynes has described Velvet Goldmine as also being about the love story and collaboration between Britain and America, and it seems likely this new biopic will follow similar themes.

There is no word on casting as of yet, but if the filmmakers manage to find us a decent modern day Bowie and Iggy, there’s no reason at all that Lust for Life can’t be an entertaining and enlightening addition to the film/music collaborative canon.